News tagged with crustaceans

(Phys.org) —A research team with members from the U.K., Germany, and Mexico has confirmed the first known existence of a venomous crustacean. In their paper published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, the ...

Many ancient crustaceans went extinct following a massive collapse of reefs across the planet, and new University of Florida research suggests modern species living in rapidly declining reef habitats may now be at risk.

Heather Bracken-Grissom, marine sciences professor in the FIU Department of Biological Sciences, has helped answer one of the most debated questions among evolutionary biologists: Did the hermit crab evolve into the king ...

(Phys.org) —Each year, between the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of old growth forests, humans put about 10 petagrams of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. A petagram is one quadrillion grams. Ten petagrams ...

(Phys.org) —Fish with parasites attached to their heads have a stronger preference for left or right when facing a T-intersection, giving them an edge when it comes to escaping predators, research from The Australian National ...

Some research has shown that the effects of changes in the climate may be weak or even non-existent. This makes it easy to conclude that climate change will ultimately have less impact than previous warnings have predicted. ...

Crustacean

Thylacocephala?
Branchiopoda

Remipedia
Cephalocarida
Maxillopoda

Ostracoda

Malacostraca

Crustaceans (Crustacea) form a very large group of arthropods, usually treated as a subphylum, which includes such familiar animals as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. The 50,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at 0.1 mm (0.004 in), to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span of up to 12.5 ft (3.8 m) and a mass of 44 lb (20 kg). Like other arthropods, crustaceans have an exoskeleton, which they moult to grow. They are distinguished from other groups of arthropods, such as insects, myriapods and chelicerates, by the possession of biramous (two-parted) limbs, and by the nauplius form of the larvae.

Most crustaceans are free-living aquatic animals, but some are terrestrial (e.g. woodlice), some are parasitic (e.g. fish lice, tongue worms) and some are sessile (e.g. barnacles). The group has an extensive fossil record, reaching back to the Cambrian, and includes living fossils such as Triops cancriformis, which has existed apparently unchanged since the Triassic period. More than 10 million tons of crustaceans are produced by fishery or farming for human consumption, the majority of it being shrimps and prawns. Krill and copepods are not as widely fished, but may be the animals with the greatest biomass on the planet, and form a vital part of the food chain. The scientific study of crustaceans is known as carcinology (alternatively, malacostracology, crustaceology or crustalogy), and a scientist who works in carcinology is a carcinologist.